| August 27, 2015 |
Welcomeelizabeth |
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| August 27, 2015 |
B Readings for Thursday, September 3rdelizabeth |
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| August 27, 2015 |
Hybrid Assignment 01elizabeth |
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| August 27, 2015 |
w Digital Media and Society Syllabuselizabeth |
Digital Media and Society
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% Steve Jeannot completed
One example used by Jodi Dean in her essay “Whatever Blogging” to elaborate on the notion of “whatever being” and the form of communicativity that it points to is Liam Lynch’s song “Whatever.” In the song he has a George W. Bush impersonator yell, “I’m George W. Bush, leader of the free world. I want to bomb Iraq. And when the world says, ‘no’! I say, ‘whatever!’ Sadam has started to meet our demands. Yeah, whatever.” The term “whatever” in the American culture is used as a passive-aggressive conversational blocking tool. In Dean’s article she discusses how this “whatever being” has no preferences. In this impersonation in the song “Whatever” we see that this form of communicating does little to help whoever is receiving this message. It goes with Dean’s overall theme of the new form of communication that has permeated this culture. There are more voices in today’s digital media in the form of blogs, social media sites, etc. but these voices seem to offer exposure and anonymity which in some ways the receiver of this message is left saying “whatever” on move on to the next one.
A second example used by Jodi Dean in her essay “Whatever Blogging” to elaborate on the notion of “whatever being” and the form of communicativity that it points to is the word cloud. A word cloud is “a graphic representation of the content of a text understood in terms of frequency of word use.” With word clouds people have now taken context out of words and how they are said and by whom and why. It displaces the meaning and creates a very different story then the person who said it may have initially intended.
The “whatever being,” in my opinion, could be anyone and everyone. There are millions and millions of “whatever bloggers” out there who post their likes and dislikes and may or may not care about how many hits or views they get. It’s all about getting their content out there no matter who may or may not see it. I am torn a bit on this one as we all have the freedom to say whatever we want wherever we want, but if the content is not up to par in your opinion what does it really matter?
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% Dree-el Simmons completed
In her essay “Whatever Blogging,” Jodi Dean discusses the “new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity through citizenship, ethnicity, and other modern markers of belonging.” The way that I was able to enter into/access this idea, was by understanding that what she was referring to is the multitude of ways society has had to self-identify traditionally, rather than the ways that self-identification is thought of today. She used the illustration of the ways in which we identified during the Cold War, between the US and the Soviet Union. There was a definite “us and them” mentality, that was a collective identity we shared as a collective body. In American cinema, the Americans were always portrayed as the ones working for the greater good, against the evil Russians. Our collective social way of life was extolled as being the ideal for the American way of life and the standard that we all are measured by. This diversity of freedoms, inversely is was formed a unifying identity for the masses within the American culture. However, the homogenized culture of the Soviet Union is exactly what made them so different and a potential threat to our way of life.
The blogisphere that has become to be a contemporary expression of individuality, has eroded the collective sense of identity provided for society previously. The measures by which we judged ourselves and in turn, connected with others to embody a like-minded communal self-identity, has been undermined and made a 180 degree change – that now thiese things are exactly what makes our self-identity and experience unique and individual. We now have the idea that “we are with them, but we’re not really with them.” The concept has moved to say, “whatever happens to me matters – in and of itself.”
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% Natasha Wong completed
In the essay “Whatever Blogging”, Jodi Dean talks about “new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity”. What this means is that eventually we will all have a different community and personality that is no longer tied to what previously defined us. In one example, Dean says that ” if mass media addressed society directly, organizing and speaking to the masses as collectives, contemporary networked communications have multiple addressees- addresses known and unknown, friends and strangers.” In this assessment, Dean is making the point that traditional mass media previously influenced the collective “us” while the influence of networked technology reaches people in different ways. This made me think of the Vietnam war and how U.S. citizens only knew what was reported to them by the media, whereas in today’s society information is received in a number of different ways, through friends and strangers. Often times, Facebook becomes the means by which we hear breaking news because information has the ability to go viral in a matter of seconds. In the “whatever” society, there is no deep thought process before hitting the send button, no thoughts of the consequences that could potentially be faced. Another example Dean uses is the cinema, which she says ” changed the nature of the crowd by providing an imaginary mass body.” In this section she discusses how ethnic groups, religious, political organizations and racist law worked against the image and goal of a unified political identity. One way that these forces were countered was through the use of film, because it was understood as a collective experience. In this way, the unified political identity was able to get their message across to a large group of people, reinforce their beliefs and set the culturally accepted standards for society. Still, she makes the point that there were forces that attempted to fight against these unified political identities. However, the “whatever being” is portrayed as a passive entity, a being that doesn’t really stand for much, it just passes the same information around to its network without deep thought and reflection.
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% elizabeth completed
Due by midnight Tuesday, November 3rd (300-350 words).
In her essay “Whatever Blogging,” Jodi Dean (2013:169) articulates the “new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity through citizenship, ethnicity, and other modern markers of belonging.” Choose at least two examples used by Dean to elaborate on this notion of “whatever being” and the form of communicativity that it points to.
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% Mahwish Khalid completed
The similarity between Von Kempelen’s machine and Amazon’s new platform is that there’s a human power behind it. Von Kempelen’s machine didn’t perform magic by playing chess on its own, his assistant was inside the machine making the moves. Amazon’s platform also has a human power behind it, it’s by the humans, Turks. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was developed due to the failure of the artificial intelligence. Technology is great, it helps with everyday life move faster,though I believe it often creates more problems than solving it, but at most the technology does help. It doesn’t run on its own neither it was created on its own, there’s a millions of hours of human brain power behind it; to creat it, run it and fix it.
The connection between Automaton chess player and Amazon’s platform, Ayets was making, I believe, is that no matter how much technology advances, it will always need some sort of human work behind it. It may be possible in the future to have/create technology that will no longer need human brain power, but as of now, it can’t be possible and frankly speaking, I don’t think I want to live in that time where the world is run by machines and not humans.
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% Sergio Rodriguez completed
Ayhan Aytes basically draws a connection between Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Chess Player Automaton and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system in order to create a historical base from which he can implicate AMT as carrying out neoliberalism via the shared commonality of this cloaked cognitive labor performed in both models of comparison. The Chess Player presents the illusion of artificial intelligence and is a metaphor for the illusory quality of AMT’s system, the fact that the cognitive labor being performed is alluded to by referring to those cognitive worker’s as “mechanized turks” or “turkers” is a sly and problematic ping back to the orientalist roots of the Chess Player Automaton. Ironic or perhaps not (as is the way Neoliberalism works) that AMT is in name a continuation of the “Oriental” automaton that of current employs the cognitive labor of people from the Global South, most notably, Indian workers. The work is piecemeal and is similar in comparison to the chess player automaton due to the micro and macro elements at play in both systems; as chess is an intellectual and strategic game (originally from India too) and reliant on individual moves in order to achieve capture of the other player’s pieces. AMT is a system that relies on singular tasks being completed and does not involve the same worker in a unified or ongoing relationship to the work – I mean to say, it’s almost like an assembly line (using a factory metaphor here even though that is not totally relative) in that the worker is performing one task that goes towards a whole but that is not aware or connected to that whole process. This system differs from our ideas of Chess, as that game infers a level of awareness of all the potential roles or ways a piece could potentially affect the desired outcome of the game on a large scale – that is why the “Mechanical Turk” of the Chess Player Automaton was so intriguing and romanticized, even after it was discovered to be a hoax. This idea of mechanized intelligence represented infinite possibilities to the West, to be able to reap all the benefits of human intelligence, without the human. But the bottom line is that, technologically speaking, we are not there yet, and there is still a reliance on the human and their human intelligence, there is a person inside both systems that make them function, this is the crux of the analogy and also important to consider when thinking about what this kind of reductive labor practice as a trope (vis a vis a major corporate entity, Amazon) has on the cognitive worker’s it employs.
By presenting this labor being performed as automatized, and emanating from a machine or machines somewhere (in the case of AMT many of it’s Turker’s are outsourced from far outside of the Western Sociocultural environment) the labor and the considerations towards workers performing it are made invisible. Not only does the cognitive labor take place outside of the mechanization, but also takes places outside of the society it usually serves (this is an estimation, as I imagine that the main target is the American West.) What does this mean for the cognitive workers within the AMT system? What does it mean for the actual pieces of work that they perform? Aytes does a great job of breaking down how these cognitive workers fall into a “state of exception” as disembodied laborers within a neoliberal framework.
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% Yauheniya Chuyashova completed
The connection Ahyan Aytes are trying to make between Amazon.com’s new digital labot market Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) and chess-playing machine is a human brainpower.
Humans are the ones who created technology. Amazon Mechanical Turk was made after failure of the program of finding matching product pages on retail website. After that the project engineers turned “to humans to work behind computers within a streamlined web-based system”, later it was available for “privet contractors” in return for some profit.
Chess played automaton was created and presented in 1770 by Wolfgan von Kempelen at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. After the Automaton Chess Player was exhibited for 84 years in Europe and the Americas. The idea of chess-playing machine was completed by IBM’s Deep Blue computer in 1997. In the beginning the idea was to give an expression that “the pipe-smoking Turk mannequin” can play a chess against human being by been controlled by a complicated mechanism. But in the reality it was a person (Kempelen’s chess master assistant) who was just hidden form everyone under the mechanism.
The connection between this two mechanist is very interwoven. When we are in process of doing something, we think that we are dialing with some programs, in Amazon Mechanical Turk example, but in the reality it is just a human who works behind the scene and helps us to accomplish our goal. And in chess playing machine it is the same technic, when we play we thing we are playing against “sophisticated mechanism”, when in reality we are playing against human being. At the end everything have been controlled my human’s power.
It its always a human behind all this, because at the of the day, human knowledge the one made all this happened. Human knowledge helped technology to develop.
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% Diami Virgilio completed
Ahyan Aytes takes us deep into the labyrinth of Enlightenment thinking to explain the symbology behind the meaning of the automaton in general and the automaton chess player conceived by Wolfgang von Kempelen. For Aytes the original mechanical turk was a tool for demonstrating the wondrous possibilities of industrialized objects to a credulous public and a system of enclosure for the assistant who secretly maneuvered its inner workings. The apparatus of the machine, enclosing a secret laborer was especially unique in that said laborer’s work was principally cognitive. Unlike other industrial objects that might be manipulated by men only to perform a mechanistic function, it was intelligence itself on display in the case of the mechanical turk. Aytes propounds that the enclosure of cognitive labor within the apparatus of industrial capital is a disturbing analogue to the modern day experience of Amazon’s Mechanical Turks.
Like von Kempelen’s assistant, Turks also function within an apparatus of digitized network enabled labor. They perform the equivalent of piecework in crowds, moving the pieces across the neoliberal chessboard at a depreciated wage, expected to perform their duties mechanistically (according to notions of the Protestant Work ethic that is so essential to capitalism), lest they face unspecified and arbitrary rejection of their work. This cultural labor apparatus reifies conceptions of racist Orientalist docility common in the Enlightenment era, particularly in that many of the Turkers hail from southern Asia.
What is most interesting is Aytes’ notion that the mechanical turk represented almost, but not quite. The ghost in the machine was human, yet anticipatory of future devices which would have their own capacities for semi-autonomous action (i.e. IBM’s Watson), though even those bear the mark of humans as they are programmed by human minds. The crowd which performs the functions of divided mental labor in the case of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program serves as a kind of circuitry of an integrated system of capitalism. What labor system the turks anticipate in late digital capitalism is anyone’s guess, but it seems reasonable to think it will include disquieting notions of self-regulation and disempowerment.
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Classroom
